Another Mopar Off My Bucket List - Barracuda Fastback

The past few days have been spent researching all of the various options for the Charger.

After reading several articles on intercooler options we've decided to scrap the plan we had. Our goal was to have a system that would not need constant re-filling and would be available on demand 24/7.

An air to air intercooler would have to cool the air before it enters the supercharger and wouldn't produce much benefit. It would also be ugly as sin.

A water cooled intercooler would add quite a bit of weight if we had a large reservoir and the temperature of the water would rise as the car was being driven. Without a computer program set up to compensate for the wide range of inlet temps it would screw with the air/fuel ratios. - And efficiency drops as the water absorbs the heat and gets warmer.

Before we'd ever read anything about using an air conditioner compressor to provide a chilled form of heat exchange it had occurred to us that one could be designed. Our thoughts were that we'd have a closed loop system that would maintain a steady temperature and wouldn't weigh as much or need to have an ice/water mix refreshed. Hopefully it would give a better benefit on temperature drop too.

My son read up on Ford's attempt to do it several years ago with a supercharged engine in their 'Lightning' pickup. There was so much heat soak that the intercooler was only able to provide a cooled charge for 15 to 45 seconds at a time. You then would have to wait for the system to cool itself down for a few minutes before it would give you a benefit again. So, - it wasn't going to be the full time available cooling we were looking for.

The car was going to be designed for daily driving and the intercoolers weren't likely to give us a big enough benefit on long cruises.